The Republican War Against Women by Tanya Melich

Author:Tanya Melich [Melich, Tanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-57389-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1976-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

The press often said that the New Right distrusted Bush, coming to this conclusion because men like Viguerie and Weyrich were always accusing the vice president of trying to destroy the Reagan revolution. It was not true. In fact, Bush had been more loyal to the Reagan revolution than had his detractors, who were constantly taking Reagan to task for not being ideologically pure. What the Reagan revolutionaries feared was not Bush’s ideology but his lack of fire for their cause.

Bush’s loyalty extended to the New Right’s social agenda. He never wavered. His staff kept a tight rein over his positions on women’s issues, particularly abortion and family planning. So paranoiac were they on the matter, in fact, that an anti-choice filter was applied even when it was not relevant. In the fall of 1985, Mary Curley, one of the Republican Family Committee’s founders—and the wife of one of Bush’s principal fund-raisers—wrote Jim Pinkerton, research director of Bush’s PAC, the Fund for America’s Future, asking for Bush’s position on family planning. What she received instead was a statement on Bush’s position on abortion, which included opposition to federal money for abortions except for danger to the life of the mother, support for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe, and support for the Human Life Amendment with exceptions for life endangerment, “assault rape,” and incest. Nowhere in this array was there a mention of family planning.

The committee already knew Bush’s position on abortion. Pinkerton’s answer confirmed what we had already suspected: In the minds of the Reagan administration and its designated presidential successor, family planning and abortion were the same thing. Earlier that fall, we had stumbled on this strange mind-set by accident when Barbara Mosbacher, another committee founder, wrote RNC chairman Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., that she was resigning from the Eagles, an organization of big-contributor Republicans, because of the administration’s hostility to family-planning programs. Mosbacher scrupulously avoided mentioning abortion. She had hoped to convince the party and the administration to modify their hostility to family planning by documenting its importance. As she wrote, “with an annual increase in world population of 85 million people and the U.S. teenage pregnancy rate rising precipitously,” there was no rationale for “curtailing U.S. government efforts to help third world nations contain their populations” or for “crippling Title X, the nation’s mainstay law aimed at reducing… unintended pregnancy.”

But Fahrenkopf, ignoring what Mosbacher actually wrote, interpreted her resignation as anger over abortion. In the minds of the Bush staff, pregnancy prevention and making a choice to abort after becoming pregnant were the same thing. Opposition to both were part of the right-to-life movement’s agenda, and Bush wasn’t about to allow any questions to be raised about his anti-choice commitment.

But his stance greatly disturbed pro-choice Republicans, many of them prominent contributors and longtime friends, and they let it be known through a continuing stream of protests. By March 1987, when the problem could no longer be ignored, Bush took a superficial step in their direction by announcing he had shifted his abortion position away from Reagan’s.

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